Finding Community in the 1950s
There is a new rental community going up near me: townhomes, villas, and “affordable” apartments. This has led to vehement protests: “What about our property values?” “Renters will lead to crime in our neighborhood.”
This got me to thinking about the townhome rental community I lived in, with my parents and three younger sisters, during the 1950s. Park Forest, Illinois was a suburb of Chicago, and my dad took the bus every day to the elevated train, and then the train to his downtown job issuing passports.
The townhomes we lived in sprang up quickly after World War II, to provide housing for the returning GIs and their young families. It was the Baby Boom, you will recall. Those homes were “affordable.”
There were about ten townhomes in a row, all connected, followed by a break and then another ten. There must have been about fifty in all, with lots of green space, a “tot yard” with a stockade fence around it and two large parking lots, although many families, like ours, didn’t own cars.
We felt fortunate to have an end unit, which gave us a little more space and another window. Three bedrooms and bath up, living and dining down. The kitchen was good-sized, with room for a small table where my sisters could have a bowl of cereal before they went to bed.
We lived there seven years. It was a “stopping place” for most families. Almost all the mothers were stay-at-home-moms and the dads were professionals who moved up in their careers and then were able to buy homes.
I remember it as a neighborhood, where all the kids rode bikes on the sidewalks and roller-skated. There must have been cohesiveness among the adults, because we have photos of outdoor potlucks where the dads all cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on flimsy aluminum grills lined up in a row.

My friend across the grass was Jewish, not that I knew what that meant. Another friend was Catholic. From her, I learned the kids in her family all had to be named after Saints. She went to something called Catechism, which was very mysterious to me. We had a neighbor who was Armenian and brought spicy dishes to the potlucks. I was in Brownies, and my friend Mary Ann’s mother was the leader. That made sense, according to my mother, since Mary Ann was an only child. My friend Holly’s mother baked bread, and I will always remember sitting on her stoop and eating the fresh-baked thick white slice with melting butter. The aroma alone made my mouth water.
Once a week, my mother went out at night (!) and walked to a neighbor’s house to play bridge with other women. Then, once a month, there was couples’ bridge, always right in the neighborhood. That was my introduction to the chocolate “bridge mix,” which we only had when my parents hosted. And cashews! What rare delicacies.

One year, my parents hosted a New Year’s Eve party and other couples from the neighborhood came. Black and white Brownie camera photographs memorialized the evening. My mother wore a low-cut black velvet dress and black velvet heels. She was always glamorous. (When she looked at the photo fifty years later, she said, “Who’s THAT hussy?!”)

They played Charades and the pictures show they had a good time pantomiming movie and book titles. Men against the women. But the photos of the “Pass the Orange” game are a bit startling. The participants stood in a circle, alternating man, woman, man, woman. One person secured an orange under the chin, hands behind their back. The object was to pass the orange to the next person’s chin, no hands allowed. Obviously, this involved getting quite “up close and personal,” with the person next to you. If one of you dropped the orange, that couple was out. This kept the sexual tension high as you were always working with a member of the opposite sex. What would a sociologist say about this game? That it was some weird way to have a harmless physical connection with someone other than your spouse?


Well, it was the fifties, the era of cocktail parties, cigarettes, booze, and risqué party games!
I wish I had a picture of another game they played that night, which my mother described as “hilarious.” A man left the room and was blindfolded. When he returned to the living room, all the wives were sitting around the room with their shoes off, in their stocking feet! The objective was for him to kneel on the floor and go all around the room trying to decide which feet belonged to his own wife. Imagine, having some strange guy feel your size tens or stroke your bunions, before saying “Nope!” and moving on to the next woman. The fact the women all wore stockings doesn’t improve the “ick” factor.
In 1990, I had a chance to be in Park Forest and revisit the townhomes. They looked just as they did when I lived there. What a great idea to provide affordable housing for young families starting out. I hope they still gather for summer cookouts. I wonder if they ever play “Pass the Orange.”
Do you think community is important? What is your community? How can we make opportunities for more community? What about affordable housing?
Comments